Washington Capital Partners will not
only operate as a classic VC; we intend to differentiate ourselves
by focusing on the tremendous opportunities present in the
realm of technology transfer. We will focus considerable energy
on identifying, extracting, and commercializing federally
funded technologies currently being developed in our federal,
corporate, and university laboratories.
This federally funded technology resides
in over 600 federal, corporate and university labs. Much of
the technology remains "trapped" in the labs and is ripe for
commercialization at the cost of royalty payments. Government
funding, personnel and facilities can, in effect, be made
available to venture capitalists who have the security clearances,
reputations, contacts, relationships, and credibility to harness
these assets for private sector productization and sale.
Technology transfer, when executed
properly, is a proven business/investment model. It has been
demonstrated by the efforts of Clint Murchison, Henry Singleton,
and George Kozmetsky (and others, including Arthur Rock) in
the creation of companies such as Litton and Teledyne. These
companies were founded with technology harnessed from federal
labs, much of which emanated from lab research performed during
WWII and the Korean War.
Perhaps the most well-know and cited
example technology transfer is the Internet, which can trace
its origins to the U.S. Department of Defense's DARPA (Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency). In 1968 a mandate was
issued to create a network (which became DARPAnet) to link
the computers of scientists at Stanford, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara,
and the University of Utah, who were working on projects for
and funded by the military. They needed a distributed or secure
network for collaboration; a network that could transport
data between mainframe computers securely in the event of
an attack - be it nuclear or other. This
resulted in a decentralized network in which the vulnerability
of any single computer would not bring the network down. The
scientists were so pleased with this new vehicle for collaboration
that its popularity spread across universities throughout
the country. The seeds of the modern day Internet had been
sewn.
